The thumbnail showed a guy in a white linen shirt sitting in front of a bookshelf that looked rented. He had the smile of someone who had just remembered to smile. The course was called something like Monetize What You Know: Build Your Expert Brand in 30 Days, and it was on sale — marked down from what the platform claimed was a hundred and ninety-nine dollars, which, I mean. I bought it for forty.

I want to be clear that I knew, at the moment of purchase, that I was probably not going to learn forty dollars' worth of new information. I bought it anyway because it was a Tuesday night, the kids were finally asleep, I had a lukewarm cup of coffee, and I had convinced myself that this time someone was going to hand me a framework that actually closed the gap between "guy with ideas" and "guy who ships something people pay for." That is the whole business model of the advice industry. They are not selling information. They are selling the feeling you get right before you find out the information was free.

I watched three modules before I fell asleep on the couch with my laptop open. The fourth module was still playing when I woke up at 1 a.m. The guy in the linen shirt was explaining what a niche was. I already knew what a niche was. I closed the laptop and went to bed, and I still felt vaguely hopeful, which is the part that bothers me most in hindsight.

How a forty-dollar course ends up in a cart at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday

The brother-in-law had sent me a YouTube video. He sends me a YouTube video roughly every ten days — a new angle, a new opportunity, a new guy in a linen shirt. I watch about half of them, which is more than I should and less than he'd like. This one was a thirty-minute pitch for the idea that software engineers were "sitting on a gold mine" of teachable knowledge and just needed to "package it correctly."

"You already know all this stuff," he said, over text, with three fire emojis. "You just gotta teach it."

And I thought: yeah, but. But what, exactly, I couldn't finish the sentence. Which is how the course ended up in my cart. I'd been half-thinking about making content — I'd already been doing short-form stuff from the car with mixed results — and I figured maybe this course would tell me something specific about the teaching-things-for-money angle that I hadn't already absorbed from three years of ambient hustle content. The forty dollars felt like a reasonable bet. It was not a reasonable bet. But it was a Tuesday.

I also want to note that I'd been in a stretch where I was genuinely trying to think bigger than delivery runs. DoorDash is reliable in the way that a treadmill is reliable — it does exactly what it says, you just end up exactly where you started. I wanted something with a different shape. The course promised a different shape. The course delivered a different shape of the same thing I already knew.

What thirty-seven Udemy modules actually contain

Module one: find your niche. Module two: validate your niche. Module three: something about "your ideal student," which is a phrase that made me feel a little queasy in a way I couldn't immediately name. By module five we were talking about email lists. I don't have an email list. I have a Notes app from 2010 and a whiteboard with eleven unfinished ideas on it.

The production quality was fine. The guy — his name was something like Brandon, I genuinely cannot remember — was clearly comfortable on camera, clearly had done this before, and clearly had a very specific definition of "expertise" that was mostly about confidence and lighting. At one point he said, and I wrote this down because it struck me as both true and completely useless:

"You don't have to be the world's best. You just have to be three steps ahead of someone who wants to take the first step."

I stared at that for a while. It's not wrong. It's also the kind of thing you could put on a throw pillow and it would help exactly no one figure out what to actually do on a Thursday night when the kids are in bed and you have ninety minutes and a depleting sense of momentum. The advice was real. The gap between the advice and the action was the whole problem, and the course had nothing to say about that gap.

I finished maybe twenty of the thirty-seven modules over about two weeks. The later ones got into platform specifics — which I won't repeat here because I genuinely don't know which of it is still accurate — and a section on pricing that boiled down to "charge more than you think you should," which, again, is technically true and practically a shrug. I kept waiting for the module where he explained the part I didn't know. It didn't come. This is a pattern I keep running into: the person selling the framework sometimes hasn't done the job the framework is supposed to teach.

I did take one note that felt useful: he said to build the smallest possible version of the thing and show it to five people before you build anything else. I already knew that from software. But hearing it applied to a course made me realize I'd been treating "make a course" like a construction project instead of like a pull request. That was worth something. Probably not forty dollars, but something.

The forty dollars, plus the part I'm not counting but should

Forty dollars, cash money, gone. I've spent worse — I once paid for a domain name I used for eleven days — but I've also spent better. Forty dollars is a solid Thursday dinner for everyone if I stack the right codes, and I think about that now every time I see a course on sale. There's a version of me that treats saving forty dollars as seriously as earning it, and that version of me would have just Googled "how to make a course" and read four free blog posts. That version of me is smarter than the Tuesday-night version of me.

The less countable cost was the time. Not the watching time — that was couch time, low-stakes. The real cost was the two or three days afterward where I was in a weird holding pattern, half-convinced I was about to do something, not actually doing it. That's the tax the advice industry charges that doesn't show up in the price. You buy the course, you feel like you're moving, and then you have to come down off that feeling before you can actually move. The comedown cost me a long weekend of low-grade distraction.

I did not make a course. I did not build an email list. I did not find my niche, at least not in any form Brandon would recognize. The whiteboard still has eleven ideas on it. One of them says "teach something??" with two question marks, which I added after module three and have not touched since.

What I kept from thirty-seven modules and a guy in a linen shirt

The smallest-possible-version thing stuck. Not as a revelation — more like a reminder that I already knew the rule and kept violating it. I've been building small tools that almost get somewhere for a while now, and the honest reason most of them stall is that I gold-plate them in private instead of shipping something ugly to three people and asking if it solves a problem. The course didn't teach me that. It just said it out loud at a moment when I was ready to hear it again.

I also came away with a clearer sense of what I'm not going to do, which maybe counts as value. I'm not going to make a course. Not because I couldn't — I know enough about a few things to fill thirty minutes — but because the version of me who would do it well is not the version of me who has evenings free after the kids are down and a day job that starts at nine. The math on the time doesn't work, and I've learned to respect the math on the time. John asked me about it a couple weeks later and I said I'd looked into it and it wasn't for me right now, and he nodded like I'd said something wise when really I'd just lost forty dollars and learned my own limits slightly more precisely than before.

The course is still in my account. I could finish it. I probably won't. There's something almost comforting about that — the little progress bar sitting at fifty-four percent, a monument to a Tuesday night when I thought someone else had the answer and paid a modest amount to find out they mostly had my answer, just slower and with better lighting.

The brother-in-law texted me last week with a new one. Different guy, different shirt, same price point. I watched the preview, which was free, and got about seventy percent of what the course probably contains. I did not buy it. I'm calling that progress, even if the whiteboard still says "teach something??" and I still don't know what comes after the question marks.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.